Jerome Robbins

MCB's Jerome Robbins Celebration features Circus Polka, The Cage, Other Dances, In the Night and West Side Story Suite, classics spanning over 40 years and illustrating the master's stylistic range.

Director, choreographer, and idea-man Jerome Robbins has put together, and then blasted apart, the most savage, restless, electrifying dance patterns we've been exposed to in a dozen seasons.

When completed, the Jerome Robbins Theater will be unique among Manhattan venues as one of the most technically advanced theater of its size, and will achieve LEED certification for sustainable design and construction.

The groundbreaking choreography by Jerome Robbins, book by Arthur Laurents, and the unforgettable score by Leonard Bernstein with lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, dealt with dark themes and marked a turning point in American musical theatre.

INTERVIEWING Bea Arthur earlier this year, I asked her about the great Broadway choreographer-director Jerome Robbins, with whom she had worked on Fiddler on the Roof in 1964.

Those words are actor George Irving's, but the sentiment is echoed throughout Greg Lawrence's hefty new biography of Jerome Robbins.

Juicy stories abound in Greg Lawrence's dishy biography, which conveys at voluminous length in Technicolor detail the not very-startling news that Jerome Robbins was exceedingly difficult to work with.

The existing theater, which is in the building that houses BAC's current facilities, will open in early 2010, and will be named the Jerome Robbins Theater.

Director Baayork Lee at age 5 played one of the princesses in the original production and seems intent on holding true to the show's roots, from the Jerome Robbins choreography to the beautiful yet highly conventional sets by Kenneth Foy.

JEROME ROBBINS THAT BROADWAY MAN, THAT BALLET MAN CHRISTINE CONRAD (BOOTH-CLIBBORN; 304 PGS.

In June 1953, CBS and NBC aired "The Ford Fiftieth Anniversary Show" starring Ethel Merman and Mary Martin and directed by Broadway legend Jerome Robbins.

Her designs have illuminated, both physically and metaphorically, the works of Paul Taylor, Trisha Brown, Twyla Tharp, Jerome Robbins, Antony Tudor, Jiri Kylian, and most recently, Christopher Wheeldon.

The brilliant but utterly self-loathing Jerome Robbins even asked her to marry him.

He has been married for 60 years to dancer Sono Osato, who was featured with the original Ballet Russe and American Ballet Theatre, and starred as the original "Miss Turnstiles," in the Leonard Bernstein/ Comden and Green/ Jerome Robbins production of "On the Town", as well as other Broadway shows.

The choreography, originally created by Jerome Robbins, was set by choreographer Alan Johnson, a member of the 1960 Broadway cast of West Side Story.